Principal Software Engineer, Kessel Run Release

About F9

F9 is a mission-oriented team of Principal Software Engineers that have come together to deliver modern software engineering capabilities to the United States Defense Industry. Our customers include the United States Air Force, Aerospace, Raytheon, and Harris.

F9’s CEO, Eric Schoonover, started his career as a software engineer at Microsoft and Netflix where he progressed from a risky hire with no experience and no education to a principal level software engineer. He co-founded a YCombinator-funded startup after leaving Netflix and eventually landed at Time Inc as Vice President of Engineering. Prior to founding F9, he was Director of Engineering for the United States Digital Service in the Executive Office of the President, and Director of Engineering at the Defense Digital Service in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

All F9 principals have extensive private sector experience and deeply value a culture of effective software engineering, freedom, and responsibility.

About Kessel Run

F9 holds a multi-year contract with the Air Force contributing to the Kessel Run software development program. Kessel Run has changed how the Department of Defense organizes, codes, builds, deploys, and operates software in support of American warfighters.

The Kessel Run Engineering Services (KRES) team is based out of the Kessel Run Experimentation Lab (KREL), an entire floor of the WeWork office in downtown Boston. KRES is responsible for developing and operating a suite of shared services that deliver economies of scale to the software engineering teams addressing a wide variety of Air Force missions.

The KRES team develops and operates engineering, security, release, deployment, health & monitoring, runtime, identity, and a variety of storage services. Each of these services is leveraged by dozens of mission teams and hundreds of software engineers.

Responsibilities

As a Principal Software Engineer on the Kessel Run Release team you will be responsible for the design, development, delivery, and operations of the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines that enable all Kessel Run software engineering teams to validate, release, and deliver secure software artifacts to operational environments in support of our war fighters. Today this team supports more than thirty Kessel Run software engineering teams, additional teams are on-boarding weekly.

The Kessel Run Release engineering team provides CI/CD services implemented using Concourse CI/CD. Concourse composes jobs, tasks, and resources to create pipelines. Jobs are triggered when resources emit specific events, the state of a resource can be provided to a task as an input. The Kessel Run Release pipelines are used by all Kessel Run software engineering teams, you will be responsible for the reliable operation of each pipeline.

A majority of applications being released by the Kessel Run Release pipelines are Java SpringBoot applications that are packaged up as WAR files. As the scope of work for the Kessel Run Release team expands additional capabilities need to be designed and delivered to support validating and releasing new types of applications. Currently first class support for Docker based applications is a priority.

Required Capabilities

This is a principal level individual contributor position, the expectation is that you are a highly effective software engineer capable of delivering faster than most competent people think is possible. You work well with less experienced software engineers, you guide them towards valuable contribution. You have demonstrated hands-on experience implementing multi-tenant CI/CD infrastructure that supports hundreds or thousands of software engineers. You understand how to build idiomatic Docker containers that are secure, small, and start quickly. You have experience developing and operating multi-tenant services running in a commercial cloud environment.

Other Qualifications

At least 8 years’ experience working as a senior or principal level individual contributor on a software engineering team

Resume must include one or more example of successfully leading the implementation of a multi-tenant CI/CD service used by multiple different software engineering teams (e.g. CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Travis CI, Concourse)

Proficiency coding in Java using a toolchain that includes Gradle, Spring, Spring Boot, and Guava.

Proficiency coding in Python using a toolchain that includes Python, Gunicorn, Docker.

A SECRET level, or above, Security Clearance

Nice-to-Haves

Resume includes one or more examples of successfully transforming large-scale legacy software, data center, and/or on premises infrastructure programs to a modern cloud native application architecture

Resume includes one or more examples of successfully leading software, data center, and/or on premises infrastructure engineering teams to transform waterfall-based programs through the adoption of Agile and Continuous Delivery best practices at the DoD or other highly-regulated organization.

At least 5 years’ experience working as a software engineering lead or infrastructure engineering lead leveraging large scale cloud infrastructure as their primary application platform.

A TOP SECRET level, or TS/SCI, Security Clearance

Working at F9

Generous Compensation
We came for the mission, but we know the market value of the best people. We offer generous compensation packages in-line with industry.

DIY Benefits
We give our employees a generous allowance to use on a healthcare plan of their choice from several flexible tiers and formats. If you don't spend it all, you keep the difference.

Gear for Professionals
We understand that having the right gear makes your life better, and your work better. Premium noise-cancelling headphones, a top-of-the-line computer of your choice, and a baller mechanical keyboard are all standard issue. Something else? No problem. We trust our team to expense what they need.

Unlimited PTO
As a group of senior and principal engineers, most of us have families and—quite frankly—amazing lives outside of work. Get things done, but take as much time as you need, when you need it.

Ownership & Freedom
F9 hires experts in their field and trusts them to make the most of their time. You will own every aspect of your work, because we trust you to be awesome.

Proper Playtime
Whether it's snowmobiling in the mountains or dining at some of the best restaurants in the world, our team outings are not standard corporate events. You will never be forced to participate in mediocre mandatory fun.